Among the many other fantastic lesson plans outlined by our DWRL colleagues for the recent Digital Pedagogy Open House, the Typography Team™ offered the following exercise as one way to integrate a rhetoric of fonts into a writing classroom. In your typical freshman comp class, instructors often observe that a student tends to give more thought to...
What’s the Matter with Helvetica?
[x_section style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 0px; padding: 45px 0px 0 0px; "][x_row inner_container="true" marginless_columns="true" bg_color="" style="margin: 0px auto 0px auto; padding: 0px 0px 0px 0px; "][x_column bg_color="" type="1/1" style="padding: 0px 0px 0px 0px; "][x_text]Throughout this semester, anyone who hears that I am researching typography will sooner or later ask me what...
For the Love of the Ampersand
[x_section style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 0px; padding: 45px 0px 45px 0px; "][x_row inner_container="true" marginless_columns="true" bg_color="" style="margin: 0px auto 0px auto; padding: 0px 0px 0px 0px; "][x_column bg_color="" type="1/1" style="padding: 0px 0px 0px 0px; "][x_image type="none" src="http://www.dwrl.utexas.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Screen-Shot-2015-10-27-at-4.21.30-PM.png" alt="Anatomy of an Ampersand, a Vitruvian sketch of an ampersand" link="true" href="#https://www.flickr.com/photos/snapfus/9541189831/" title="A Vitruvian...
X Marks the Spot
[x_section style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 0px; padding: 45px 0px 0 0px; "][x_row inner_container="true" marginless_columns="true" bg_color="" style="margin: 0px auto 0px auto; padding: 0px 0px 0px 0px; "][x_column bg_color="" type="1/1" style="padding: 0px 0px 0px 0px; "][x_text]"Where is your group?" Considering our project's cartographical component, it's a particularly apt question to wonder where...
Two Types of Type: Part II
Previously in this space, I used the work of the late Adrian Frutiger to illustrate a particular way of thinking about typography. According to that view, a typeface is best when it goes unnoticed. Font is meant to invisibly transmit an writer's point, without the letterforms interfering with either the author's intent or...
Two Types of Type: Part I
A few weeks ago, on September 10th, Adrian Frutiger passed away in his native Switzerland at the age of 87. If you don't recognize his name, that's just as well: Frutiger was among the foremost typographers in the latter half of the Twentieth Century, and a strong proponent of the...
Typography: Up and Coming
This sentence is in Lato. Most likely. (more…)